"This war may be just or unjust, but any fair-minded man will admit that it is England's war, not Ireland's. When it is over, if England wins, she will hold a dominant power in this world, and her manufactures and her commerce will increase by leaps and bounds. Win or lose, Ireland will go on, in our old round of misgovernment, intensified by a grinding poverty which will make life intolerable. Yet the poor fellows who do not see the advantage of dying for such a Cause are to be insulted as 'shirkers' and 'cowards,' and the men whom they have raised to power and influence have not one word to say on their behalf. "If there is to be conscription, let it be enforced all round, but it seems to be the very intensity of injustice to leave English shirkers by the million to go free, and coerce the small remnant of the Irish race into a war which they do not understand, and which, whether it is right or wrong, has but a secondary and indirect interest for them. "I am, dear sir, "Your obedient servant, "-|- EDWARD THOMAS, "Bishop of Limerick. "_November 10, 1915._" The seditious Press took up the cry: "Conscription had not even been applied to her own sons, yet England was applying it to Irishmen," said Gilbert Galbraith in _Honesty_; adding: "for all she wants of Irishmen is their lives that she might live," and he warned Irishmen that "she (England) who took everything they had and stripped them naked and left them like Christ to the ribald jest and sneer of the rabble in the world's back-streets, would, like every bully, try to have revenge when she got them by themselves." Had this been mere verbal sword-play, however, I should not quote it; it was more: it was the taking up of the challenge of cowardice. "Will you in God's name get ready to answer her?" concluded the famous article in which he appealed to these would-be exiles repatriated by force; "because, if you want to, all you have to do is to get into touch with the nearest corps of Irish Volunteers." They would give them instructions, he added pointedly, how to act, and what they did they had better do quickly, for it might be too late on the morrow. Could one be surprised, I ask, if some of these would-be emigrants answered the taunt gun in hand?--especially when men like Captain White, who was afterwards to try to rouse the South Wales miners to endeavour to save Connolly, was telling them plainly:-- "You are fast being led into industrial slavery. You know it, and I am apprehensive and angry, but too bewildered to move. To rob you of your right over your own poor bodies is the workers' tyrant. To rob you of your sovereign power over your own will is the workers' devil. "Awake, brothers, before your liberty is dead. Arm yourselves against your real enemies. Say to the tyrants and their agents, 'The first man who lays hands on me against my will dies.'"